“Lucky” mistake leads police to 89-year-old with grenade

An arrest on Abdijstraat in Oosterhout took a strange twist on Monday. Instead of leaving with a handcuffed suspect, the police walked away with a hand grenade.

Officers showed up at the house of an 89-year-old man on Monday evening to arrest a female suspect. After searching the house the police concluded that the woman gave them a false address and that the old man knew of nothing, BN De Stem reports.

The elderly man perhaps felt that the police should not travel all the way to his house for nothing, and can do something useful while they're there. "When the officers wanted to leave, my grandfather said: 'Wait I have something for you. Then you can take it along'", the man's granddaughter Yvonne Bakx told the newspaper. "He then pulled out a grenade."

This gave the officers quite a fright and they called in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal squad. The grenade turned out not to be dangerous.

"My grandfather had it for years. He found it in the forest in Hilvarenbeek and it's from the Second World War. I had to laugh. The officers too eventually, when they knew that the grenade was not dangerous. If you then also think that my grandfather initially refused to open the door for the police and talked to the officers through the letterbox."